It’s your life.
Alex’s words from last night come to me. This is my life, and whatever I decide to do with it, I’m the one who has to live with the consequences—consequences I’ve already experienced once. Why not try to avoid the bad bits? It’s not like this internship will be the deciding factor on whether I get into law school.
“I won’t say anything to her yet, though. Sleep on it and get me your answer by the end of the week,” Mom says, hopeful.
Great. Now I have to disappoint my mom twice.
Because I’ve already decided: There’s no way inhellI’m doing that internship again.
This is my life. I’m the one who has to live it.
That night, as I’m laughing at another text from Alex, Madison exclaims, “Okay, what the hell is going on?”
She hurls herself across the room and wrenches my phone away, ignoring my protests. She frowns as she scrolls, and I think of how I wanted to keep Alex to myself a little longer.
Emphasis onlittle, I guess.
“Who the hell is Alex?”
“He’s a guy I met.” I shrug, not wanting to make a big deal of it. “It’s hard to explain.”
“Why haven’t you told me about him?”
“We just met,” I say, ignoring how hurt she looks. “Actually, funny story, Alex was the source of the watermelon I smelled yesterday. Isn’t that strange?”
She looks even more confused. “But you’ve been talking about watermelon for days. Why were you talking about watermelon in the quad on Friday if you just met this Alex guy yesterday?”
Damn. Ireallyneed to make a mental note to never forget that Madison is smart and will catch me in a lie if I’m not careful… and this is a huge lie for her to catch. An existence-erasing lie. “That was… a coincidence,” I try. She stares at me like I’ve grown a second head.
“So you stormed outside to find the source of a watermelon smell you’ve been smelling for days, and you met this Alex guy. And now you text about… bugs?”
I consider explaining that actually, the texts she’s referring to are about seafood.
“That about sums it up,” I confirm. It’s too much of a hassle to get into.
“Why’d you let me go on about Ellie when you’ve already moved on to this Alex guy?”
I’m about to protest that I haven’t moved on, that Alex is just a distraction, but I stop myself. We established earlier that Madison has a big mouth when she’s with Patrick. Whatever I say now will probably get back to him and therefore to Ellie.
Didn’t I wonder if part of the reason Ellie fell for Cat was that she dated other guys during freshman year and didn’t spend it pining after him? Maybe it’s time to test that theory.
Maybe the idea that I’ve moved on with another guy is exactly what I need Ellie to think.
9
My life has become nothing more than a rerun.
The thought hits me on Wednesday as I’m disassociating through my eight a.m. class. All week—the past week and a half, really—I’ve sat in my classes watching life go by a second time with a passivity not unakin to the experience of scrolling on my phone while an old TV rerun plays in the background.
Only the rerun ismy life.
I can’t stop thinking about my conversation with my mother, the way she’s already pushing me to pad my law school application as if it’s a given that I’m going. I remember this pressure. The crushing weight of it. The fear that no matter how hard I tried, I would never achieve the success my parents wanted. Even knowing now that I got into law school, that I got a good job, doesn’t help. The pressure still weighed heavily in my chest during our conversation. Maybe that kind of weight never goes away, and at best you simply learn to ignore it.
I keep replaying Alex’s words in my mind:
It’s your life. You’re the one who has to live it.
I’ve already lived my life once, and according to a cosmic being, I did it all wrong. And now, I’m just… doing it again.
